A is for asparagus

The asparagus patch in winter is brown and empty of life. An appearance that is deceptive. Late in February a spear appears, popped up like a mushroom after a rain, a surprise as you walk by the patch.How did it get to be six inches tall without our noticing?

Standing in the still cool from the morning chill, eating that first asparagus raw, gives a purpose to our labors on the farm. We harvest them daily for about 10 weeks.

 

B is for the Bees

Our smallest livestock, for that is what they are on a farm, are a constant presence whenever the weather allows. Even on a warm January day they congregate on the stoops of the hives and then fly off in search of nectar. The Jessamine growing on the pergola flowers in January. Each time we step off the back porch the hum of the bees greets that step.

The hum that announces their activity is a dramatic note in the sheet music of our farm whether we are harvesting cucumbers or dining at a picnic. The honey harvested at the end of the season from their labor is the coda to the piece.

 

C is for Crabapples

When planting our orchard crabapples were an afterthought in the main apple orchard. But thirteen years later the larder is full of jars of crabapple jams and jellies. Crabapples with rosemary, with pear, with blueberry and a few jars of apple butters all make buttered toast a more satisfying breakfast.

Thomas Jefferson was able to get 129 gallons of cider from his Hewes Crabapples. My output is more modest. Yet under our stairs are bottles of crabapple wine, cider and mead. The extra fruit is used to make sauces to spoon over pork chops or to spoon into pigs.

It is hard to imagine our orchard without our Calloway Crabapple tree with its bright red fruits each year.

 

D is for Dumplings

An old hen or rooster seasoned well and simmered until tender in a dish laden with herbs, onions and celery makes the perfect home for dumplings. Egg sized lumps of dough nestled in a rich broth is as close to paradise as I plan on getting. So good in fact that to limit oneself to a single bowl of chicken and dumplings is not possible, hard even to conjure the person so mean of spirit who would try.

We raise chickens, I imagine, not for the eggs but for their contributions to this one perfect dish. We are impatient for them to mature and reward us with a dinner that grounds us in domesticity. For indeed who would break up or leave the happy home that held the promise of more bowls of chicken and dumplings?

 

E is for Evening Sounds

The sun sets. And our neighbor’s dinner call to her children echoes out of a nearby holler. The clang of our own dinner bell and the whir of the coffee grinder, the bleats from sheep demanding their due and bellows of cattle from farms up and down the valley all signal a change from day to night.

Deeper in that evening the frogs join the chorus by booming a query for love and answered in summer by locusts in the millions. The owls curiously hoot in a secret language exchanging tips, we imagine, on which field has the plumpest mice. We move out of the kitchen and settle into chairs on the front porch and listen for the night to begin. The sun’s final glow, hours after sunset, is claimed by the stars and moon which were waiting for their showier cousin to exit. On cue coyotes enter the valley singing to each other with weird triumphant yips. The evening ends and night begins.

 

F is for Feeders

Rough cut barn siding knocked together with nails and screws in a v-shaped trough, galvanized one-ton hog feeders and twelve inch metal chick trays, assorted rubber bowls, Indian River plastic juice jugs cut in half, creep feeders built to exclude sheep while the lambs feed, hay nets and metal feeders tied and bolted on the wall of a shed, a bowl of Polish pottery from the kitchen lost in the muck of a stall later excavated with the wonder of old Schliemann finding Troy’s debris; feeders, either store bought, improvised or homemade multiply on a farm.

Peer in a shed, behind an outbuilding, open a cabinet door and stacks of feeders functional or past their prime greet your gaze. Or consider the repurposed life of a twelve-foot plastic cattle trough on an aluminum skid, destroyed by Bellow the bull ten years past, later served as toboggan on a snowy day with a too fast trip down the hill.

 

G is for Goose  

Guardian of the farm, savage frightener to children of all ages, centerpiece on the holiday table, loyal spouse and provider of a most excellent fat, this is the goose.

Its stately presence navigating the swathes of green grass is not unlike the pictures of a Spanish Galleon sailing the ocean. That noise from a flock, indicating a threat, whether coyote, pickup truck or child, inspires awe at high decibels. The roasted breast is as red and finely grained as the best beef. A confit of legs preserved in their fat is well served shredded over pureed green peas. These are the tastes of our holiday farm table.

And the final gift of a quart of fat from one bird, browning our roast potatoes for the next year, makes for an appreciative farmer.

 

H is for Hay

Security from want, forage in storage is protection against evil days of drought and heat or the cold and muck, a well-stocked hay barn, for all the talk of extended pasture days, brings warmth to this farmer’s heart. It seems a form of wealth.

From the flush of green grass in March through the first cutting in late May that growth and then the rhythm of collecting those grasses ties me to the rhythms of the land and the seasons. The muscle ache from the hard work of fencing off lush pastures, constructing storage barns, cutting, raking, baling and the moving of this basic produce of our land is another definition for joy. It simply makes me feel useful to feed forage to our livestock, a handmaiden, if you will, to the meat on our table.

 

I is for Indian Summer

Late October and our valley gets its first hard frost. Like somewhat tardy ants in Aesop’s fable these cold nights send us scurrying to complete summer chores. Busily stacking hay bales, finishing fence repairs, harvesting the last peppers, storing winter squash and cleaning the summer gardens while waiting for the long days of winter to creep onto our farm.

Then summer plays its annual trick and elbows winter back for a few weeks of warmth. Like a tense interlude before the next act, a stale impersonator of the vibrancy of summer days, a guest who will not leave a party even as the decorations of fall drop from the trees, this is an Indian Summer.

And then one day winter arrives, the wind kicks up, the last leaves hit the ground and ice is found on the water troughs when we feed in the morning. Summer is now a memory we hold for the future.

 

J is for Jack Frost

As a kid in south Louisiana I remember the keen excitement of being told at the breakfast table that Jack Frost had visited overnight. We’d run outside to see the brushstrokes of frost on grass, windows and on the last of the summer garden. By the time we were off to school he had already gone, taking his artwork with him.

On our Tennessee farm I still feel the same pleasure, walking a pasture dusted with his work, watching the sun reclaim with streaks of light. Part playful, merry prankster, harbinger of change: Jack Frost signals the exit of summer’s Jack of the Wood and tells us to check our stores of goods for the coming of Old Man Winter.

 

K is for Kraut

Kraut, kimchi or kraut-chi: That simple alchemy of veggies and sea salt yields delicious and shelf stable nutritious food in a few short days, championed by Misters Price, Katz and Vaughn. Made from whatever is in season but always benefitting from the crunch of cabbage. Chop your veggies, mix with salt and stuff into a jar and you are off.

Since joining the Church of the Holy Fermented Veggie we usually have a jar or two or five bubbling away on the kitchen counter. Combine cabbage with celery and caraway seeds for a straight forward kraut. Or add in apples for a nice fall dish. Or consider turnips and greens, poblanos or Sriracha, ginger and fish sauce, tomatillos and even anchovies, kohlrabi, pears, garlic, onions or Brussels sprouts in any mad combination you wish. And you will have only begun to scratch the surface of possibilities.

All will be tasty and good in the end. We promise… if not feed the extra to your pig. He will thank you and return the favor. We know.

 

L is for Lard

Fear of fat, fear of flavor has driven from our less enlightened contemporaries knowledge that the word larder originally meant where the lard was stored or bacon hung. Replaced in the mid-twentieth century from its rightful throne by such offensive mass produced products as margarine and vegetable oil, lard deserves to be reconsidered.   

Rendering pork fat into lard for kitchen use is simplicity itself. Low in polyunsaturated fats and high in goodness it is hard to imagine our larder without jars of various rendered fats to choose from when cooking or baking. Leaf fat is rendered into the purest lard for baking; lard made from fatback for any recipe calling for butter; high heat lard smelling of porky goodness for Mexican dishes or slices of lardo, cured and hanging under the stairs, used to dress up some fresh baked bread, all have their times and uses. All pay homage to the pig and ones efforts at nose to tail eating.

Just remember that the cure for any “lard ass” is not the fat you use but the activity you choose. Get up off that aforementioned body part and move.

 

M is for Mercy

Mr. Blake says that “mercy has a human heart.” As a quality based on compassion for those in one’s care, mercy on a farm gets a lot of experience. It is frequently exercised in dispatching an animal when butchering, mercifully killing an injured duck whose leg has been pulled off by a turtle or any of the other seemingly endless ways of dying or being injured on a farm. Farming expands with a clear-eyed view the means and ways of compassion, strips the sentiment and leaves you with choices that cannot be put off on anyone else.

 

N is for Nature

Our greatest delusion, our most destructive belief is that humanity is separate from nature–not animal, not of the earth, not returning to the soil under our feet or the air over our heads. We create specialized ghettos for nature, with national parks and pretty coffee table books that fertilize the delusion of our apartness, and then we lead lives imagined to be wholly of our own construction.

Good small farming is a deliberate rejection of this delusion, a daily practice of being part of nature through more careful cooperation and competition. The small farmer’s every task is determined by the natural world. Farming strips off the rose-colored glasses that give rise to the absurd assumption that we are well and truly apart from nature and returns a bit of awe and love and respect to the soil and air to which we belong.

 

O is for Oregano

Beloved herb companion of the tomato, the wild marjoram or pot marjoram’s of old cookbooks, erba da funghi for Italians; oregano, it hangs drying in great clusters from our farm kitchen ceiling.

Reputed to be the herb to honor Aphrodite, newlyweds once wore garlands to give extra happiness to their union. And indeed a homemade pizza without an over abundant handful of oregano scattered across the surface would affect my own good outlook.

Imagine the poverty of the world without the mint family of thyme, sage, basil, savory, mint or oregano and the troubles of this sad world only increase.

 

P is for Planting

It is an act of hope for another day, another season, another year, another chance at getting it right. A belief and understanding that the days will lengthen, hope that Persephone will be allowed to return home to her mother, that green shoots will emerge and that a harvest will result. That fat ears of corn, fresh greens and perfectly ripened tomatoes will grace your garden. That you will take real pleasure and a misappropriated sense of power in seeing white and red clover sown by your hand, cover the land. That the maple trees planted last fall will yield shade in a short ten years on some summer day.

That work of preparing the soil, saving the seed, putting up fences and taking them down, sowing cover crops, tilling them into the dirt is all done so that one fine August evening you can sit down with your family.  Sit down at a table with platters of tomatoes and basil, roasted ears of corn, potato salad and grilled pork chops from a pig fattened on sweet clover and overripe squash.

Because that act of planting is for the harvest.

 

Q is for Queen Anne’s Lace

The morning dew draws your eye to the lace while a new spider web anchors the flower to surrounding grasses. Delicate in appearance unlike its corpulent name sake, Queen Anne’s Lace is a welcome guest on our land. Similar in appearance to poison hemlock, make sure to know the difference unless your name be Socrates.

While also useful for eating (the wild carrot) or treating gout we simply appreciate its role in attracting pollinators. Like the butterfly bushes, crape myrtles and hydrangeas around our house and the iron weed in the fields, Queen’s Anne Lace in bloom is covered by honey bees, butterflies, wasps and humming birds.

As one guest species to another we appreciate its contributions.

 

R is for the Rooster

He literally rules the roost, determines the pecking order and is the king of the barnyard. His crow is the opening note on that sheet music of the farm, a dramatic solo signaling the arrival of each day.

A Speckled Sussex rooster at three-years is a creature of beauty, broad of chest, dark red combs and wattles, long spurs and a full and colorful plumage. While the hens have their heads down eating his is up and vigilant for interlopers. Mating dozens of times a day he makes one exhausted with imagining the possibilities.

And when that day finally arrives and the old boy has lost his crow, he is butchered and cooked into a most satisfying coq-au-vin. And, next morning, around five, the new king of the barnyard sounds his opening note for the day.

 

S is for Scotch

On a cold January night there are certain essential luxuries that complete life on this farm. A fire lit in the woodstove, a kitchen table covered in seed packets, envelopes with vegetable varieties scribbled down on the back, jars of saved seeds, a sketchbook for the spring garden and a glass of Laphroaig. A vision to power one through the months of heat and humidity, finally brought safely to the hearth of a winter’s kitchen.

Smoke and peat combined in a whisky helps this farmer wrap his head around the dreams and work of the coming year. A garden that will be productive, beautiful, a credit to the valley, another sip and the garden has doubled again, transformed in size by the inspirational power of an Islay malt.

 

T is for Turnips

And what did you expect? Of course “T” is for turnips. In spring or fall a few rows of turnips feed the eye and feed the stomach. Your greens and root vegetables in a perfect package: a glorious green with a pretty tasty root crop. They yield 15,000 pounds per acre for the root and 3,500 pounds of greens. That is a lot of food for the table. Or simply till them in as a cover crop and you will have just put a significant amount of biomass into your soil.

On this farm we like our greens. We like them in a stir fry or in long simmers with smoked pork and new potatoes. We like the greens and turnips in our kimchee or cooking the roots with potatoes for a spicy mash. Turnips make the garden look good and this gardener feel good.

 

U is for Udder

A last minute difficult lambing before guests arrive on the farm. We pull the still lamb from the ewe. Grabbing the back legs we swing it back and forth. It begins to breathe. A quick rubdown with straw and we push the big lamb to its mother. As a single it has both teats on a full udder to itself. It will do fine. We head out of the barn to greet our guests. We are gore spattered with afterbirth but satisfied we could help.

Whether two teats on a ewe or four teats on a cow an udder is nature’s delivery system giving health to newborns. A lamb or calf nursing an udder swollen with milk and life enhancing colostrum is your sign as a farmer that all is as it should be with your charges.

 

V is for Vegetables

Even the most devoted carnivore needs a potato now and then. But for the rest of us our veggies are an endless source of pleasure. A thoughtful dish rewards the farmer for his or her hard work and celebrates the virtues of that plant. Eggplant parmesan, fried okra, crowders with garlic and dill, tomatoes in sauces or eaten raw in the garden on a hot summer day; these are few of our favorite ways.

In rows of beans and sprawling squash, with basketball sized cabbages and the pepper plant that never gave up, in the corn field or the potato hill, among the Brandywines and onion bulbs, you pause and give honor to that ancient rustic who first grew and harvested the dish that will grace your table tonight.

 

W is for Wild Turkey

Midnight skies, a flock of wild turkeys heard but not seen on the opposing ridge.

Bush hogging the back pasture I startle a flock as they graze, like flying basketballs they lift off with surprising speed and grace. Walking through the woods to feed the hogs and a rustling overhead draws my attention to a dozen roosting in a sycamore. Driving down Possum Trot and I brake suddenly to avoid a large hen and poults. They scurry to join their kin under an oak. Wild Turkeys are everywhere in our valley.

Now I’m walking one fine November day, a week before Thanksgiving, carrying a shotgun, and finding that our intended dinner has removed itself from the landscape.

These sounds at midnight confirm their canny reputation.

 

X is for Xylocopa virginica

Sitting on the back stoop under the pergola lacing up my work boots and a cascade of sawdust drifts down over me. Looking up at the rafters, I spot a neat, symmetrical 3/8- inch hole. Similar holes are found throughout the barn and other outbuildings, all testament to the industry of the native pollinator the Eastern carpenter bee, Xylocopa virginica. A constant presence, the carpenter bee is busy across the farm, drilling holes to lay its eggs and raise its larvae.

The piles of sawdust are one indicator of its activity. Another is the high-pitched buzz emanating from a wooden post as I pound in a fence staple. Eventually the carpenter bee flies out to angrily confront the disturber of its domicile. But it virtually never stings and is a rather benign partner on our land, one whose work is admired and cascades of sawdust deplored

Y is for Yell

A good yell is one of the ancient arts, an invaluable tool for communicating in and around this farm.

A loud and drawn-out “Pigeee” brings a sounder of pigs stampeding through the woods to the dinner trough, a “Come on, come on” projected from the chest brings the cattle to hay, and a high-pitched “Yoo-hooo” from Cindy penetrates even the deepest reverie and brings me trotting to assist.

A midnight call from a hunter to his lost dog, a mother’s call to her scattered children at dinner, a persistent call for help that signals a neighbor trapped in his barn by a rogue steer … the yell turns out to be one of the most useful tools in our farm’s toolbox.

Z is for Zucchini

A poor gardener’s friend, the zucchini rewards inattention with a bumper crop. But ignore this veggie at your peril. With back turned for a day and you find a modest fruit has grown to the size of a baseball bat. This tendency alone is why it is good to raise a pig next to the summer garden. Pigs will eat your oversize zucchini and overripe vegetables. And they would eat your baseball bat for that matter.

Two good plants will provide all your “zuke” needs for a season. So productive you scramble for ways to eat them: layered in lasagna or simmered in tomato sauces, bread and butter pickles or added to your kimchi, baked into a sweet bread or made into a savory pancake with fresh yogurt and chives.

But our favorite way of using excess zucchini is to stealthily leave them on a neighbor’s porch, ring the bell and run.

This is the complete alphabet published over 2013.